Let's Get Criminal

by Lev Raphael

  “Maybe he doesn’t like you.”

  “Toad.”

  “Or maybe you’re so busy being gay you didn’t notice.”

  “Snake.”

  Stefan grinned. “If you’re so curious, why don’t you ask Priscilla Davidoff to check him out? She writes all those mysteries.”

  “Feh!”

  Priscilla Davidoff taught genre fiction in our department—romances, sci-fi, westerns, mysteries—and had the office catty-corner from mine in Parker Hall. She wrote pallid but polemical mysteries in which a murder was always the occasion for turgid debates about an Issue: drug abuse, alcoholism, child support. Her books were as colorless and free of suspense as the Amanda Cross mysteries.

  Priscilla’s office and mine were sort of off by themselves, given the eccentric way the narrower corridors in our frequently divided and subdivided building spread out from the larger ones. That made for quiet, because nobody passed our offices to get somewhere else, but it was also irritating sharing this little backwater with Priscilla. A few years before, she had written a quietly lethal review of one of Stefan’s novels in The New York Times, accusing him of writing “egocentric” fiction. She was half-Jewish, so I suspected that she was really responding to the Jewish elements in Stefan’s work (though that was certainly a problematic element for him).

  “I still can’t believe we ended up in the same department as her.”

  Stefan just shrugged, unfazed, while I muttered and stalked a little, wishing all manner of childish evil on Priscilla, like I usually did when her name came up.

  I was trying to rouse him, but Stefan wasn’t moved. It didn’t even seem to bother Stefan that she was angry that a man—him—had been hired as writer-in-residence, instead of a woman.

  “How can you be so calm about her?” I asked. “I think she slammed you for being Jewish.”

  Stefan shook his head, but I really didn’t need to ask. Stefan did not viscerally respond to Jewish issues the way I did, and I had to continually remind myself of his past. Until he was seventeen, he had thought he was Catholic, the son of Polish refugees. His parents and the uncle who helped bring him up had all conspired in this fantasy, trying to hide their past as Jews and concentration camp survivors, and, more than anything, hide the terrible weight of death and devastation they had endured. But the secrecy couldn’t last, and Stefan’s father confessed it all when he was afraid he might be dying. While Stefan had long since stopped having a Christmas tree, he had not entirely switched allegiances. I thought of him as Jewish, but that wasn’t exactly how he saw himself. More than twenty years after his father’s confession, Stefan had still not entirely come to terms with what had happened in his family. Of course, that was the subject of much of his fiction: the struggle to reconcile disparate identities, to forgive, to speak the truth clearly.

  “Forget Priscilla,” Stefan said to me now. “Forget her.”

  I was less charitable, and it was very awkward for me running into her in the hallway, though it was dark and deep enough for you to pretend you didn’t see people—if you wanted to.

  “And leave Perry Cross alone,” he added. Stefan was looking at me a little sternly, and I blushed. You see, I had tried luring Perry out. I left some novels by, Andrew Holleran and Edmund White on my desk in the office Perry and I were sharing, even an issue of Christopher Street, but he didn’t bite.

  By which I mean he didn’t pretend not to notice, but what he said was so casual it couldn’t seem false. Like Tina Turner sings, I just wanted a little reaction.

  Just enough to tip the scales.

  Because it wasn’t just Perry’s being gay that drew me. I confess that another reason he got to me was an obvious one: while he wasn’t my type, I sure enjoyed looking at him. He was like one of those tightly knit ’30s matinee idols—you wanted to find him a gold cigarette case just to see him take out a Dunhill, tap it once, twice, a gentleman’s tap, and stick it into those knife-blade lips.

  I started to say something else, but Stefan, he didn’t want to hear any more about Perry Cross that evening. “I’ll be in my study,” he said, and I let it drop, going off to make coffee.

  With Stefan’s success, I discovered that I love being a votary of Literature: screening his calls, brewing his coffee, copyediting, fixing nummy snacks. It’s not just a game, because I do believe in his writing. I find his work especially powerful not just compared to other gay writers but to straight writers too. Like the author of an awful fat bestselling book I’d recently read in which, as far as I could tell, the whole point was that a straight white man learned how to cry—after four hundred pages!

  Stefan has said in interviews that without me, he wouldn’t have made it. And so I felt involved in everything he wrote. When we met ten years ago, Stefan told me that his parents and his uncle Sasha were pushing him to drop “this writing thing” and get a real job. They thought he was wasting money on a degree in writing. Stefan was depressed and wondered if they might be right—after all, he hadn’t been able to publish anything yet. Somewhat glibly, I told him that the power of parental doubts and prophecies of doom is often in inverse proportion to their accuracy. I was pleased with my formulation, but he just shrugged.

  Stefan was even talking about dragging all his stories out of their folders and burning them, just to be free, clarified, to start over—or something.

  “Oh, bullshit,” I said. “That’s just a scene from a cheap movie.”

  “Actually, writers have done that. Gogol, Henry James.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But they were already published. Nobody ever started a career with a bonfire!”

  He smiled.

  “Are you any good?” I asked. “Well, just keep writing and shut up.”

  It wasn’t a memorable line, but it helped. Like when a friendly old lady on a long bus trip nods and smiles as you reel off your life, your plans, and maybe she’s not really following, maybe she’s just waiting to talk about her grandchildren, but still it means something, still it feels nice. It helps.

  It’s not that I’ve ever been a frustrated writer myself. I’ve published a lot of academic work, but helping Stefan, I feel like I’m involved with something that will really last, will change people’s lives, the way the best fiction does.

  Of course, one side effect of Stefan’s growing fame is that I get treated in odd and sometimes unpleasant ways. Like when interviewers call me and ask what it’s like to live with him, because they want to add a bit of “the personal touch” to their articles. That makes me feel like I’m his housekeeper or something.

  I’m always tempted to tearfully say, “What’s it like living with him? It’s hell!” and hang up, but I generally throw them some vague scraps about his work and bore them enough to make them leave me alone.

  Even though I say almost nothing to people who want information about Stefan, the calls keep coming for me. I can’t really blame the reporters. If I were an interviewer, I would dig as deeply as I could. Which is what made me so suspicious of Perry Cross. When he’d saunter into our office, he never seemed right as a junior faculty member. There was an air of privilege and masquerade—as if he were serving a strange kind of sentence and would soon be released into a richer, fuller life. Meanwhile, he had to put up with students, secretaries, and people like me who were both insignificant and, more annoyingly, unconvinced that he was as important as he estimated himself to be. With the job market so very bad now, you would have expected him to be grateful to have a tenure-track position at a decent school, maybe even cringe a little. But Perry Cross was too conspicuously confident and detached—and that didn’t make sense to me.

  Something about him just didn’t add up.

  2

  BEING SUCCESSFUL, BEING THE NEW WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE, there was no way Stefan could avoid the faculty parties, though if possible, he would’ve sent me by myself since he wasn’t fond of chatting. At a party, he often just sat back and observed people, comfortable with his own silence while others usual
ly were not. It had taken me years to get used to his social silences and to stop feeling responsible, as if he were a shy child I had to coax into showing off in front of friends: “Come on, darling, show the Greenbergs your tap dancing.” I had long since given up feeling I had to cover for Stefan in case people thought he was being critical, or worse, recording their quirks for a future book. It wasn’t my job to make him talk, or to explain to anyone why he was quiet.

  Stefan wasn’t just quiet because of his personality or even his vocation—a lot of that was simply drawing back from all the foolishness he seemed to elicit as a novelist. Like when people sometimes auditioned for him, offering themselves up as fascinating prospects for fiction: “Wait till I tell you a real story!” Even the dreariest academic would fancy himself a Samuel Johnson just waiting for a Boswell, and non-academics often cheerfully told Stefan that they intended to write a book some day—when they had spare time—as if it were a grubby but worthwhile project like cleaning out the garage. To one engineer who said at a party, “They tell me everyone has a novel in them,” I had snarled, “You’d be lucky to eke out a haiku,” before Stefan dragged me away. But those were occupational hazards for Stefan, just as when I ventured outside of the world of professors and told people what I did, they often said, “I better watch my grammar, huh?”

  At least at faculty parties, I didn’t have to put up with people afraid I’d catch them splitting an infinitive. The anxieties were of a slightly higher order: would a dispute about political correctness erupt, or would someone be raving about a book that other professors hadn’t heard of yet, or worse, just have come back from lunch with the author?

  For Stefan, all that posturing and pouting was a waste of time.

  But me, I enjoy the parties, enjoy complaining about students as if we in the department were survivors of some great cataclysmic flood that had swept away all of Western civilization, except for us. Am I exaggerating? Not after four or five drinks. In an odd way, the faculty shared the same view as conservative politicians—that our country was being overrun by Visigoths—only we were faced with cultural illiterates, and the politicians feared culture and literacy both.

  As usual, the fall semester party was at our chair’s house. I did not like Lynn Broadshaw or his house. It started with something very small: feeling odd about his name. Coming from the east coast, I had never before met a man called Lynn—though that was apparently common in Michigan—and it threw me. Beyond the name, Broadshaw just gave me the creeps. He was a stocky man in his fifties, with a pinched, angry pale face that made you feel even a “good morning” was an imposition. He had only a vestigial sense of humor, and ran department meetings with all the grace and charm of an auctioneer. He was loud, he was unpredictable, he was strange. He had a terrible temper and was often berating the department secretaries. Graffiti in the men’s faculty bathroom near our department office said he was taking a correspondence course in Improving Your Interpersonal Relationships. The Remedial Level.

  Stefan and I had only been at SUM a year, but Lynn had come in the 1950s when the university was expanding wildly, had always lusted after being chair (we heard), and ended up as chair for reasons no one could exactly make clear to me.

  Just before we got to State, he’d had a stroke, and I imagine there were sighs of relief. It was generally assumed, I understood, that this reminder of his mortality was going to make him, if not cuddly, at least less demanding and dictatorial. No way. Fully recovered, he was worse than ever, as if trying to prove that he was alive by taking up far more space than one person needed.

  His sprawling U-shaped house in the center of a Michiganapolis faculty neighborhood was rather sinister, an ostentatious series of barren gray and black spaces, with dark polished granite everywhere, and black Italian complicated-looking lamps and chandeliers. Meant to impress, it was balefully chic, an intellectual train station with an enormous cathedral ceiling and spotlighted Matisse drawing over the black marble mantel. But it was a good house for parties, with its enormous living room, dining room, kitchen, and den all open to one another—each room large and public.

  Broadshaw greeted me at the door, pumped my hand with a grin as if he was holding himself back. If he really wanted to, the smile and the tight grip said, he could have tossed me over his shoulder like a scarf. He wore a flowing short-sleeved black silk shirt, black slacks, and black loafers. The scrupulously maintained tan made him look like a drug dealer on Miami Vice.

  “Good to see ya,” he growled. Broadshaw seemed to think I was not much more than a jumped-up graduate student, hardly worth his notice or his time, which is why he always shook my hand before Stefan’s, I suppose—to get me out of the way.

  “Great party,” I said, breaking loose.

  “Stefan Borowski!” Broadshaw bawled, as if he were announcing the winner of a prize, instead of welcoming a guest. He was always blaring Stefan’s name when they met, almost like the way someone superstitious would knock wood, or as if he thought Stefan’s growing reputation benefited him personally. He slapped Stefan’s shoulders now like a father urging his son to stand up straight.

  I tuned out while Stefan was being charming to Broadshaw, talking about some conference.

  I saw Perry Cross standing at the unlit fireplace, drinking, holding his glass loose-wristed, elbow on the heavy mantel like someone on Masterpiece Theater. In his modish, wide-shouldered houndstooth suit and long, slicked-back hair, he was stylish enough to be in a Calvin Klein Obsession ad. For a moment, I imagined him dark and shiny, near naked, bisected by clingy white underwear….

  Perry really did have what I could only think of as goyish appeal: that dark blond hair brushed straight back, the body whose lines were probably not blurred by hair and thus would seem impersonal, representative. He was in that way more of a statue than a man, and tonight I was surprised that he affected me at all. Usually I could look at a man like that with much more distance and aplomb because I was drawn to Jewish and Italian men, dark and hairy, with rugged open emotional faces, and yes, noses that were dramatic.

  Perry Cross was surveying the crowd buzzing about the latest publications, the latest bits of rumor, and the looming budget cuts. Back in the early ’80s, when the car industry almost collapsed, all the publicly funded universities in Michigan suffered bone-chilling cuts. It was at that time that a number of programs had been axed and faculty ranks were thinned by juicy offers of early retirement. SUM was supposedly in better shape now, but the Big Three automakers seemed to be in trouble again, and there was wild talk at the university of audits, departments being closed, tenured faculty getting laid off. It was a time when old grudges started to simmer again, and given the pettiness of many academic squabbles (bald men fighting for a comb), you could sometimes feel like you had stumbled into a gloomy second-rate opera where banditti were about to brandish long swords and burst into song. The feeling was strangely comic and depressing. I assumed that Stefan and I were safe, but I knew that if massive cuts came again, the turmoil would undermine our confidence and our teaching. It made me think of Evita: “… the knives are out.”

  When Broadshaw turned to someone coming in behind us, I pointed Perry Cross out to Stefan, who said he hadn’t talked to him yet, and then I drifted into the stone-walled kitchen that was as big and dreary as a dungeon. I said something innocuous to Broadshaw’s wife Maria, a plump and sexy Argentinean who generally laughed at almost any remark, as if she was playing the part of some dim-witted islander in a movie about the South Seas. It was definitely an act because her dark eyes were cold and unyielding. Tonight she was as chic as usual, and her white clingy sheath made her look even younger than her forty years. Supposedly, she “came from money,” but no one could tell me how.

  Maria had a way with hors d’oeuvres and she was fussing with an elaborate tray: the Rape of the Sabine Women in truffle mousse, I think. From where I stood, admiring the tray, I could see into the enormous living room as far as the stark yawning fireplace. I was a little
surprised that Perry and Stefan seemed to be locked in conversation, though I thought Stefan might be trying to figure him out. I didn’t want to join them. I nodded at Broadshaw’s secretary Claire as she passed. She was a plain, pale, almost owl-faced woman in her fifties, gray-haired, soft-spoken, with a vaguely southern accent that cast even minor interactions in some larger display of good manners and civility.

  I headed out into the cavernous and crowded room for some wine. I nodded, waved, wondering who I could pretend to be interested in tonight, wishing the stereo was playing something less endearing and sappy than Mendelssohn. But before I could decide who to chat with, Serena Fisch grabbed my arm.

  “Hi, stranger!”

  She usually greeted me in a throaty ironic way, as if she felt sorry for me new in the department, not yet tuned into the various allegiances, not yet fully versed in the complex and overlapping histories that were Balkan and Byzantine. I often expected her to chuck me under the chin and murmur how sorry she was for me—just on general principles.

  Serena Fisch made me think of words like “dame,” “skirt,” “tomato,” because she dressed like one of the Lost Andrews Sisters. She wore wide-shouldered suits and clunky shoes like theirs, had her jet black dyed hair elaborately coiled and piled, and strode down a hallway a little uncertainly, as if unsure whether to jitterbug or slink. When I first described her to my cousin Sharon, who was an ex-model, Sharon said, “Oh, she must associate romance with the forties—that’s why she dresses like that.”

  I’d heard a rumor that Serena Fisch and Broadshaw were lovers, or had been until recently, and that he had pushed for her to have the Canadian Studies position. They were so odd in their different ways that I actually could imagine them in bed.

  “Don’t you love this place?” she asked, her lips curling sarcastically, looking around us. “How would you describe it? Bela Lugosi Moderne?”